A Conversation With Jeanne Gang on Architecture With a Mission

July 20, 2016

At the Cities for Tomorrow conference hosted by The New York Times, the writer Ginia Bellafante talked to the architect Jeanne Gang, founder of Studio Gang, who is widely respected for her mission-oriented design. This is an edited transcript of their conversation.

GINIA BELLAFANTE: Jeanne’s Aqua Tower in Chicago — I’m sure many of you are familiar with her work — has the distinction of being the tallest building in the world built by a woman. Now she’s building an even taller building in Chicago.

But what I think is most meaningful and impressive about her work is the way that she’s really incorporated social justice work into all of her many projects. In the ’60s and ’70s in the United States, we had this real sense that design could solve so many social problems, right? There was Oscar Newman and Defensible Space and we thought low-rise buildings, low-rise public housing might really work to bring crime rates down.

That had mixed results. There was a lot of resistance to the idea. People think, “Well, oh no, the flow of capital to poor people solves social problems.” And it kind of faded away. And we entered an era of starchitects and big egos and — and buildings that were purely aesthetic. Where the premium was on the aesthetic. And Jeanne’s really brought back social mission architecture I think in a way that has real substance to it. And that’s what’s so exciting. And she’s going to take us on a tour of her work. And we’re going to talk about some of her most wonderful projects.

JEANNE GANG: Thanks, Ginia. I thought I’d just start with saying that tall buildings were one of the building types that people thought didn’t have any social component. But we’ve really been looking at how to use the balconies, how to use the common areas to make it possible for people to at least have a visual connection to each other.

There is a new project we’re working on called City Hyde Park that just opened in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. And so tall buildings, I think, are important, too. One of the things I really care about passionately is the river and the waterways in the city. And we’ve been working on how to use, how to open that back up so that former industrial lands can become places for social connectivity.

BELLAFANTE: I think what’s really interesting about this work is that there’s so much waterfront development in cities around the country. And a lot of it is, “Well, we’re going to plop some luxury condominiums on the water.” And there is no connectivity. And then the water’s just there as a place maybe to have a glass of wine and have a view. But what was meaningful to you about making the actual water in waterfronts important to the way people live.

GANG: There’s the lake, and the river’s really the backyard, you know, of the city, similar to waterways that go through New York. And the opportunity to bring recreational activities, ecological parks, walkways, public space to the water and giving people access for the first time was really transformational. Because, you know, this water is really dirty. And you don’t want to fall in the water. So there was kind of a resistance to letting kids get out on the water and use it.

BELLAFANTE: Was there a pollution remediation component that went on in conjunction with this project?

GANG: Well, the people that were thinking about this thought that you kind of have to simultaneously let people have access to create a constituency so that people actually care about the river. And then, in that way, they will actually be stewards of the river. So simultaneously, the E.P.A., for example, demanded that the city clean sewage water before putting it back into the river.

BELLAFANTE: So your project was really the catalyst for this other one.

GANG: A catalyst for the whole thing. And then parks and public space are something that we all have as common, you know, civic common areas. And so one of the parks that we worked on in Chicago was this Lincoln Park Zoo. And we made it into kind of a biodiverse place where there’s lots of different animals, not just a lawn with trees, but almost like a zoo without cages. So animals would be attracted. But then people are attracted.

Brownsville, for example, in New York, is a place where we just designed this Fire Rescue 2. It’s a fire rescue facility. There’s one per borough. And here it’s about putting a publicly owned building and making it very open and visible and to help revitalize that part of the city.

BELLAFANTE: I want to say for anyone in the audience who’s not familiar with Brownsville, it’s the poorest neighborhood in New York City, has the highest concentration of public housing. Terrible rates of crime. And what this will do to Brownsville is it really will bring something of aesthetic value into a neighborhood that is very, very desolate and very depressing. There are places you can stand in Brownsville and look 360 degrees, and you’ll only see these monolithic public housing towers. Very little new development.

GANG: But, you know, there is community in Brownsville. So when we started designing this, we developed a way of working with people, asking people from the community what they want to have.

BELLAFANTE: And can you talk a little bit about the way you engaged firemen and what you learned about the culture and community of firemen that influenced —

GANG: What we really noticed was the firefighters — they’re actually rescue workers, not firefighters — like to eat together, and they stay there a few days at a time. And they really develop a community. And so they have their own strong community.

But then that also makes them attractive to the neighbors. You feel like you trust a firefighter, a rescue worker. And those doors on the building are often open. And we even put a bench in the front of the building so people can actually sit there instead of taking this approach of creating a fortress, which I think is a contrast to what we see in the design of police stations.

And so really designing this Fire Rescue 2 started me thinking about, are there ways that design could help improve the relationship between community members and police if we looked at the architecture? Not that it can solve everything. But I think, you know, maybe it can be part of that dialogue in creating — relationships between police and community members which are not just the confrontational relationships.

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